"Blame Duncan Riley," opens a Fortune report on this week's awesome saga in which an ex-TechCrunch employee unwittingly manipulated Apple's stock price. But it's not over until we bury the bodies. Here's the 100-word recap:Duncan Riley, former TechCrunch blogger, claimed last week to have insider info from a tipster who had seen new Apple price sheets. Laptops started at $800 instead of $1,099, said the tipster. Analysts - if you believe them - think a sub-$1,000 MacBook would be a big change for Apple. Riley's rumor bubbled up from his own site to VentureBeat to the New York Times' new online Technology page, where news from VentureBeat and other tech sites is merged onscreen with the Times' original reporting. Some readers who didn't bother to unpack their trust issues took the headline (note the grammar error: "a $800 MacBook") as Times-grade truth. I don't blame them. The NYT accurately broke the story on Apple's $499 Mac a day before Steve Jobs unveiled it. The only thing I remember from newswriting class is that journalists are telling stories, even when they think they're reporting the truth. Riley told a good story, peppered with enough details to make it plausible. Web surfers crazy for stock market guidance swallowed the tale without stopping to chew. Now that we all know there's no $800 laptop, journalists will pat themselves on the back about some important lesson they've learned. I'll do it myself, right after I stop by Daring Fireball to watch Duncan Riley's ritual spanking.

Is Yahoo cutting 3,000-plus jobs? A source inside the company says plans have been set to slash 3,500 jobs on December 10. And, briefly, Fortune's Techland blog agreed, reporting that Bain & Co. had recommended Yahoo cut 3,000 of its 15,000 employees. The Fortune post has been unpublished, though it still appears in Google News. I've called the writers to ask what happened to the story. Here's the excerpt which ran on Google News:

Don't call it a "social network" — the product that will save Yahoo is an "enhanced profile." Which just happens to look exactly like someone's profile page on Facebook or MySpace — friends, updates, and all of that. CNET News editor-in-chief Dan Farber got the PowerPoint deck, as did AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. Is it something they teach you in journalism school — that writing about tech involves fawning over something simply because it is new and you got to see it first? I never got to take that class. (Screenshot via Webware)

"Valleywag’s Jason Calacanis believes that Apple is working on a networked HDTV," writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet. Adrian, if your editor tries to make you go back and erase what you wrote, because his drinking buddies from Columbia Journalism Review think it's fatal to publish a huge factual fuckup in the first three words of an article, call me. I'll come over and slap J. Jonah Jameson with a printout of exactly how many people have already seen it. Tell him, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup." Has-been journalists love a Watergate reference.On the upside, you've given Owen and me a whole new topic for slow afternoons: People who don't even know they're working for Valleywag. Calacanis was easy. Scoble isn't hard enough. We'll have to figure it out some more. Jason: Holla back! Aw, come on. We hate it when you don't holla back. (Photo by Peter Kaminski)

A cameraman caught CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin checking Facebook in the middle of Wednesday's presidential debate. Come on, admit it: You were doing it, too. (Why is GOP media consultant Alex Castellanos's name scrolling through the frame? Yeah, we couldn't figure that out, either, but we're told it's Toobin on screen, not Castellanos.)

Marc Santora, the New York Times reporter who appears in ads for Dell's DigitalNomads site, says he received no compensation for the ad, which came from an interview Santora did for Big Think, a website backed by Facebook investor Peter Thiel. What appears to have happened: Dell or its ad agency, Federated Media, created the ad for Dell's DigitalNomads, using a clip from Santora's Big Think video. In a comment, Big Think cofounder Peter Hopkins says that Dell is a sponsor of his site, but the ad does not mention Big Think. (The Big Think interview was also published to YouTube, and DigitalNomads' producers embedded the clip in a blog post.) From what Santora's saying, no one asked him or the Times for permission to run the endorsement. If so, Dell could be in rather big trouble — and not just with the Times.FTC rules forbid deceptive advertising — such as an ad from Dell which suggests a New York Times reporter has endorsed its vision of mobile technology, when he hasn't. The agency also has strict rules governing endorsements, not all of which seem to have been followed here. Bottom line: Santora seems to be the victim of a sleazy new Internet-enabled advertising tactic. He does offer this amusing side note: The one time he wrote about Dell was when the computer maker's "Dude, You're Getting a Dell" spokesman was arrested on pot charges. Here's his note to us:

The long, slow process of scientific peer review makes a dull story. It's much snappier to throw out a contrarian question like, "Has Google made us stupid?" After the topic bubbles around a bit, it's appealing to find an exclusive new study that rebuts the media's own conventional wisdom. When that reporter's need arises, PR people are there, exclusive new studies in hand.Science from UCLA now suggests that searching the Internet a lot, for years and years, is measurably good for your brain. Awesome! I'm glad to learn I haven't been giving myself brain damage since 1981. To celebrate, I used the Internet to find out how many people are on UCLA's media team pushing that study. I miss the old days, when they'd have bought me lunch.

Why is Marc Santora, a respected war correspondent for the New York Times, appearing in ads chattering about mobile technology? Click on the ad, running on sites like VentureBeat, and you're taken to a site, DigitalNomads, which appears to be a collection of blog-filler pablum about the wonders of the wireless Internet. Buried at the bottom is a tiny disclaimer: "Powered by Dell." Dig under the ad-placement code, and you'll see that the ad is sold by Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network. Battelle's outfit grew infamous last summer for getting some of the bloggers for whom he sells ads to recite a sponsor's slogan. That last time, it was Microsoft.At no point does Santora mention Dell's name. But his underlying message, that new technological gear helps us all do our jobs better, certainly serves Dell's purposes. I would have thought that the strict Times ethics code would forbid such an endorsement, paid or otherwise. Why bloody the reputation of someone who's taking a bullet to get stories for the newspaper? I've asked the Times what's going on, but haven't heard back yet. Update: Marc Santora has written in to let us know he had no involvement, financial or otherwise, with the ad — which just adds to the headscratching.

"We're liveblogging the world," funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis tweeted about Mahalo's new human-powered news feed on the search site's front door. Jason, help me out here: A couple weeks ago you bragged about forecasting the Startup Depression of 2008. Now you've added a powered-by-humans news feed to your product that looks like CNN crossed with Fark. How did you justify this to your investors in the face of a startup depression? Because from my experience, all English-language content looks the same to a VC. I'm not sure if I should ask when your funders will finally pull the plug on your two-bulldogs lifestyle, or if I'm just playing on the wrong team.

GigaOm's Om Malik and Mashable's Pete Cashmore like to present themselves as leaders of a new kind of Web 2.0 journalism. Both turned up at Current TV's offices Friday, ostensibly to cover Current's Twitter-enhanced coverage of the first Presidential debate. Truth is, Current's publicists had called reporters to tip us off that executive chairman of the board Al Gore would be there. Gore didn't bother to use Twitter himself — he didn't even stick around for the debate. But he did take time to pose for photos.Malik and Cashmore, perhaps taking a cue, didn't do any real reporting on the event, leaving that to Threat Level and Laughing Squid. The two simply blogged their Al-and-me pictures as news stories on GigaOm and Mashable, bringing themselves one step closer to the old media stereotype of the vain reporter who can't stop inserting himself into the story — or in this case, into the non-story.

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Current TV's Twitter-enhanced live feed of the Obama/McCain debate on Friday "broke new ground," according to Wired blogger Sarah Lai Stirland. But it's been nearly a month since the September 8 premiere of CNN's Rick Sanchez Direct, in which Sanchez turns the camera on Twitter for the modern version of man-on-the-street quotes. How it works: You add Rick. He adds you back. You then tweet live during his show. He may pullquote you, or run the live stream onscreen. Sanchez, currently following nearly 18,000 people, already drew attention for his live tweet-reading during Hurricane Gustav, when Twitterers filed reported facts to millions of viewers.Current and Twitter's debate stream was interesting, but not new. Mashable and VentureBeat covered the launch of Sanchez's show three weeks ago, noting that CNN's arrival had forced Twitter's management to exempt Sanchez, like Robert Scoble, from their usual limit on the number of feeds one user could follow. If you thought Current's lazy stream of debate tweets was hot, watch the above compilation of the always-slighty-overexuberant Sanchez: "My Twitterboard's about to explode." (Video by 23/6)

It's Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis's world, we just have the misfortune of living in it. The former Silicon Alley Reporter publisher decided to quit blogging, instead opting to send out his verbose fonts of wisdom as emails. Take his latest 2,948-word missive, "(The) Startup Depression" — claiming that anywhere from half to four in five startups will fail thanks to the current economic crisis (or at least, will blame their failure on the economy). Apparently Calacanis asked that the post be taken down. Because of a principled stand for intellectual property? Because SAI's publisher was getting the pageviews and Mahalo wasn't? Or because Calacanis can't take the heat in a public forum? The fight that broke out in the comments between Wallstrip creator Howard Lindzon, Blodget and serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer suggests the latter.

Here's a novel angle for tonight: Instead of happy-tapping your every thought during an important national discussion like 50 million other tards on Twitter, shut up and listen to these guys. You don't need our commentary. We'll look at yours later, promise. But if you do want to follow a bunch of bitchy bloggers in realtime, our bestest buddies at Gawker will be team-blogging with a far more pols-n-media savvy crew than we've got here in the 650. As long as Pareene goes easy on the ! key, it should be fun.

All those years in the theater on Broadway among catty drama types didn't thicken the skin of New York Times technology writer David Pogue much. Geek Out New York blogger John Teti wrote a clearly satirical piece wondering just how technology-savvy Pogue. His latest column described how you can use Google to search individual websites. Teti didn't even point out the misspelling of Facebook as "Facebok!" (Which I hear is the leading social networking site among South African antelopes.) The pile-on-Pogue post was clearly facetious, but that didn't stop Pogue from emailing Teti to complain. And then emailing again. And again. Pogue's initial, angry missive in full after the jump.

Philip Anschutz's reimagined Examiner newspapers are like Melissa Gira Grant's escort friends: The status-conscious feign ignorance and contempt, then pick one up when no one's looking. Anschutz is a billionaire Republican and a devout Christian, but up until now he's proven more interested in making money in a post-Craigslist local ad market than in trying to save San Francisco from pot-smoking gay abortionists. That's why today's cover, which endorses the GOP's John McCain and Sarah Palin ticket the day after McCain's "huh-what?" suspension of his campaign, seems to be a classic case of election emotions spun out of control. It's like Hollywood celebs who vow to leave the country — except with consequences.Slate media critic Jack Shafer, who used to edit the SF Weekly, has obsessed over the Examiner's "mash-up of short local stories by staffers, brief wire pieces, and abridged articles from the New York Times and other newspapers" into a daily 20-minute read for an Internet-fed world. "Tabloid format. Not tabloid journalism" the Ex claimed in one of its ads. I usually wait until partygoers have a few drinks before conducting an ad hoc poll: Invariably, more middle-class technorati confess to reading the Examiner than the San Francisco Chronicle or San Jose Mercury News. Not because of the glossy online edition, or the built-in Digg and Fark buttons on every story, they say, but because the lightweight, free newspaper is easier to pick up and hard to put down. The Examiner's politics have pushed nothing near a far-right agenda. Instead of a David Brooks or Michael Savage on the opinion page, we get right-of-center everyman Ken Garcia, rescued from the soft-sinking Chronicle. He's kind of hard on Gavin Newsom, but nowhere near Bush-team material. After all this careful seduction of local readers, today's front-page endorsements in both the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Examiner seem clumsy and pointless. Is anyone going to change their vote because of the paper? Endorsing candidates on the front page is a relic of the time when newspapers were the dominant voice on the street. It's a throwback to The Examiner's original owner, William Randolph Hearst. I expected that by now, the editorial and marketing minds who've convinced me to openly read The Examiner in front of the New York Times-toting snobs at Whole Foods would come up with something smarter than plastering their partisan politics across my front page. And yes, I'd feel nearly as stupid carrying around a front-page endorsement of Obama.

The Shenzhou 7 mission will feature China's first spacewalk, so it's kind of a big deal. That's why reporters are snickering over state news agency Xinhua's accidental posting of a report that vividly describes the rocket in flight, complete with quotes from the three astronauts inside — "air pressure in the cabin is normal." The article, dated this coming Saturday, was live on Xinhua's website for several hours prior to the launch. (Photo by Reuters/Li Gang)

The Huffington Post has a guy who emails me if I typo their URL in a Valleywag entry. So I doubt it's a lack of managerial attention that allowed a brazen advertorial for Thrillist's new Miami edition to run on the HuffPo Tuesday. I wouldn't have noticed if Portfolio hadn't called it out as a violation of the site's own user agreement. But read Portfolio's summary of the situation and ask yourself how many outraged HuffPo editorials would appear if anyone remotely related to Sarah Palin were to get this kind of play on Little Green Footballs:Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici says:

Fred Wilson's venture-capital firm, the paper of record tells us, "has built its portfolio making small bets on young companies." That is an excellent definition of early-stage venture capital. But is Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, to be congratulated with a glowing New York Times profile merely for doing his job? Apparently so. The real thing that distinguishes Wilson from his peers are not his practices or his profits; it is his prolixity. Wilson writes a blog read by some 25,000 people a month. Newspaper reporters can relate to him as a wordsmith rather than a financier. Also, he is in New York, which makes him geographically convenient for the media capital. The news event which prompted this profile?Wilson gave a speech last week in Manhattan. In other words, there was no reason to run the story. What's really going on? Wilson himself explains: The Times had this piece in the works for weeks. My theory: Editors there felt it needed to run soon, before the sector Wilson favors — hipsterish Web startups like Twitter and Etsy — suffered some embarrassing disaster. (Photo by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)

Denver's Rocky Mountain News is having more trouble with the newspaper's grand experiment in using Twitter as a reporting tool. Reporting tool? Twitter is for oversharing and posting links to ninja cat videos on YouTube. Even before the fishwrap was sending reporters to tweet updates from a child's funeral, it had set up a Twitter feed to let reporters send updates from the action at the Democratic National Convention. One hack from Scripps Howard sent an update that included the word "fucker," and to scrape the term from the site editors had other reporters flood the site with tweets to push the obscenity off the page. At least we won't have to worry about a reporter cussing mid-funeral.It wasn't public outcry that convinced the editors to stop asking reporters to post morbid 140-character updates. Instead it was a staffer with a sense of discretion and a little humanity who raised concerns that experimenting with new medium during a memorial service for the victim of a tragic accident isn't in the best of taste. (Photo by Evan Sims

Back story: I'm lurking around one of the low-rent haunts of the highbrow magazine elite Wednesday and come upon a friend of mine, Jess, who introduces me to Donavan Hohn, a brilliant writer whose recent piece on a Hong Kong toy fair had inspired me to write a handjobby post about how much I love 'Harper's.' Anyway, like pretty much all journalists under 40 who bother with the whole "crafting exquisite paragraphs" thing anymore, Hohn has cash flow issues. So Jess suggests — naively, I'm assuming — he get into the celebrity profile racket. Her friend Mark Kirby does it! He just wrote a profile of Megan Fox for 'GQ' that was really actually a rewarding effort! And I'm thinking, "Oh Jess, guys like Donovan Hohn are just not wired to hustle celebrity profile assignments. Not least because guys like Donovan Hohn probably didn't know who Megan Fox even was when he saw her at a comic book convention at which he was busy jotting down the philosophies of some enchanting small-time hucksterpreneur, and plus, everyone knows celebrity profiles are the lowest form of hackery." Well shit, was I so totally wrong. Jess had just tipped me off to the best celebrity profile in years. Seriously, you know how the celebrity profile is totally dead? This profile could do for the genre what…Megan Fox does for impotence or something!